Yamakuzure: precisely. And if you've never learnt any asm whatsoever, none of it will make the slightest bit of sense. Whereas if you've learnt at least one to the level of coding up a basic app (which could be as simple as wc) then it's pretty easy to read an insn set manual for a new one, should that be needed when you're trying to work out what the compiler did with your code.

As you say that's most often in the context of single-stepping with gdb (or the GDB Plugin in Kate, which is just loverly. ;)

BTW for those who don't know, there's #gdb on freenode, as well as ##workingset for toolchain-related issues (best place to learn about autotools, as well as portable make.) [IRC: chat.freenode.net.]
You can also use: objdump -d to get a disassembly of your object files (RTM.)

As you say that's most often in the context of single-stepping with gdb (or the GDB Plugin in Kate, which is just loverly.

Must try that, then. My main IDE is Code::Blocks, but the GDB integration is not really helpful for some time now. I am often ending up using "gdb <program> --tui -p <pid>" instead. While it does its job, the main advantage to have IDE integration is the possibility to directly change the sources, or browse around in other files.
Thank you very much for the hint!_________________systemd - The biggest fallacies

You're right ofc: what you want from a debugger plugin is to single-step through your source files which is exactly what Kate does, and blew me away when i first tried it: it simply is IDE functionality.

That's why I'm so enthusiastic about the recent kate work; although it always used to be because I like a lightweight editor that doesn't take up lots of resource, but still does enough, more and more I'm seeing just how useful it is, when you can add in the things you need, while leaving out the ones you don't. Thus I have a "Syntax" session which is purely for working on Kate highlighter files, which only has the XML validation plugin and my standard File and Documents viewers. I don't use XML for anything else, so none of my other sessions even needs to load it, but they typically have CTags and the Build plugin (for make integration.) I don't use gdb much (I tend to see it as a failure if I need to single-step C, but it does happen) so it's only in the Asm session, and one project's main session.

The latter is the main project I'm working on, and actually has several sessions depending on which aspect I want to work with; "Attach as Tab to.." in KDE 4.9+ has made this incredibly useful. it stops the taskbar idiocy being a problem (I now have windows overlapping the main taskbar at the top, which gives me more vertical space, which I love with a 4:3 LCD: better for my neck as well;) and also works wonderfully for groups, so I might have eg "System" and "Integration" sessions grouped, with both being visible as tabs. It's so elegant and so useful, because it's managed by the WM, and does not require anything from the apps themselves: a perfect example of how to use the Unix multi-processing model, with very little code, and no breaking of encapsulation.

More recently kate has added very good new python integration (I don't use it; I think it comes in with the python USE flag) which would be ideal for working on things like portage or pkgcore, or anything using their APIs (I believe gentoolkit also has some really nice python APIs, which dol-sen has done some great work on, where the portage APIs need extension.) To my knowledge, zmedico uses Kate for portage development, unless he's changed editor in the last 2 years or so.

The best thing I've found, is that the developers are incredibly pleasant to deal with. They actually foster contribution, instead of putting people off with disparaging comments whenever someone says something they disagree with. That does not mean they are pushovers, by any means. They're mostly professional developers, even if they are unpaid for their Kate work; they tend to work on it because it helps their real work. It makes a very good testbed for work on languages and compilers.

What I don't have, alas, are recommendations for setting up such an environment or even for those tie-ins that steveL is looking for for using vim (which is the only editor I'd want to use).

Well the vim link in main post is actually to Kate vi input mode ;-) so you could try that.. Nah just kidding, if you have vim setup for make then you can use that, or just tell it to run the same commands as given for kate..

What I don't have, alas, are recommendations for setting up such an environment or even for those tie-ins that steveL is looking for for using vim (which is the only editor I'd want to use).

Well the vim link in main post is actually to Kate vi input mode so you could try that.. Nah just kidding, if you have vim setup for make then you can use that, or just tell it to run the same commands as given for kate..

There are an awful lot of other commands (see the first url); and you can make your own scriptlets to run as commands using javascript (scroll down to: "Command Line Scripts". The js API common to both command-line and syntax highlighting scripts, is below that, the last section.)